The Sun lights the globe where it really is (wwwroot/js/sun.js, the Astronomical Almanac's low-precision solar
coordinates): the day map shaded by the Sun's height and the Earth–Sun distance, warm city lights on the night side,
and a twilight blend about 13° wide between them. It shows now, refreshed every 30 s, or the moment of the hovered,
focused or pinned post: a click on a card pins it, and the subsolar point travels there the shorter way round. The
panel's top corner shows that moment, the phase of the day and solar time at the post's place, and the season in its
hemisphere (or in both, for a post without a place). Its tooltip shows the subsolar point, declination, axial tilt,
distance, irradiance, day length and the next equinox or solstice.
Land borders are thin paths. Country names are in the reader's language and appear as the camera comes closer:
largest countries first, away from the globe's edge, never overlapping. They come from world-atlas 2.0.2 (Natural
Earth 1:50m), prepared by tools/globe/prepare-countries.py, and are vendored with their hashes in SOURCES.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
The globe is a UV sphere: towards the poles its triangles narrow to
slivers, and texture coordinates interpolated across them pinched the
map into a star around each pole. Each pixel now computes its own
coordinates from its exact point on the sphere, with seam-safe mipmap
gradients; the map wraps horizontally and gets 8x anisotropic
filtering.
That showed a flaw in the day texture: NASA's mosaic has a lighter
strip at its east edge near the poles, a line from each pole once drawn
exactly. The day texture is now built from NASA's original Blue Marble
(December 2004) by tools/globe/prepare-day-texture.py, which blends
that strip into the map where both sides of the seam agree; same
4096x2048 size, provenance and hashes in SOURCES.md.
globe.gl redrew 60 times a second even when nothing moved; it now draws
only during camera flights, hover pulses, auto-rotation and the
reader's drags, so an idle globe costs no GPU time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
thepraandClaude Opus 5.5